President Donald Trump on Friday rolled out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin in Alaska and sold the beleaguered Ukrainians down the Dnieper river. Three days later, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House, joined by leaders of the free world who ensured Trump couldn’t strong-arm him into accepting the malevolent Putin’s imperial demands.
At least, that’s how many Westerners have viewed Trump’s recent diplomatic efforts to bring peace to Ukraine.
The red-carpet part is true (though the rolling out was done by U.S. soldiers, on their hands and knees, a spectacle that displeased many, this columnist included). But the other criticisms reflect the mental tendency that, I believe, most insidiously corrupts Western analyses of the Ukraine war, namely, moralism.
The philosopher Raymond Geuss, in an essay on the historian E.H. Carr, argued that moralism, not utopianism, is the true antithesis of political realism. Moralism, Geuss wrote, is a “complex set of attitudes that give unwarranted priority to moral considerations in explaining and justifying human action.” Often, Geuss added, it amounts to “moralized preaching.”
Geuss didn’t argue against ever making moral judgments, and he stressed that not all value judgments are moral ones. (Appeasement can be a bad strategy independent of its purported immorality, for example, just as the point of an ink pen can be too broad relative to thoroughly amoral purposes.) What Geuss objected to was the moralists’ assumption that political judgment was reducible to absolutist moral evaluations, in both analyzing and prescribing political behavior. The realist attends instead to power and interests, even when working to create a better world.
Western moralism has been on flagrant display throughout the Ukraine war and at present obstructs the path to peace. What has happened to Ukraine because of Russia’s invasion has no doubt been a moral travesty, and the war will not resolve in a settlement that achieves the ideal of justice. Nevertheless, the war must be resolved if Ukraine is to keep its sovereignty and what remains of its devastated country.
Unfortunately, Western media, European elites, and the Zelensky government have sometimes seemed determined to make the moral the enemy of the achievable.
Consider, for example, their apoplectic response to Trump’s dropping a previous U.S. demand for an immediate and total ceasefire. Kiev wants a ceasefire because Ukrainians desperately need a respite from Russian bombardment. But Moscow opposes a ceasefire because its advantage on the battlefield gives it leverage when negotiating a final settlement to the war. When Trump, shortly after the Alaska summit, said he preferred a peace agreement to a ceasefire, the media pounced.
“Trump backs off cease-fire demand in Ukraine war, aligning with Putin,” blared one New York Times headline on Saturday. “Trump bows to Putin’s approach on Ukraine: no cease-fire, deadlines or sanctions,” read another.
Perhaps someone at the Times’ next staff meeting can ask: what’s the alternative? After all, Russia will not voluntarily cease fire until certain key demands are satisfied, and the West lacks the power to impose its will on Moscow. Trump, in recognizing those facts, has not aligned himself with Putin, as the critics claim, but “with reality,” in the words of the Russia expert Anatol Lieven.
Or consider Zelensky’s insistence ahead of his visit to the White House that Russia not be “rewarded” for its invasion and that the end of the war be “fair.” Zelensky understandably resists any suggestion that Kiev should cede sovereign territory, especially lands Ukraine still controls, in exchange for Putin halting an invasion that he never should have launched. During the Monday meeting, a reporter asked Trump if Ukraine’s relinquishing such territory would lead to a “fair peace.” Her sympathies were clearly with Zelensky and against Trump.
Indeed, several analysts and politicians have lampooned Trump’s suggestion last week that a peace deal will include “some swapping of territories.” Presumably, what the president imagines is that Russia gives up some Ukrainian lands it controls in return for other Ukrainian lands it covets—a difficult proposition for Kiev. European leaders rejected any such proposal. “International law is clear: All temporarily occupied territories belong to Ukraine,” declared Kaja Kallas, the foreign policy chief of the European Union.
To be sure, Putin’s land grab in Ukraine sets a terrible precedent for international relations. But the brutal reality is this: When a bully steals your possessions, and when you lack both the power to take back what belongs to you and recourse to any higher authority that can enforce your rights, then those possessions are not really yours any longer.
What the moralists cannot seem to comprehend is that Russia is winning the war and that the sooner the war ends, the better for Ukraine. Given those ugly circumstances, Putin’s wishes carry more weight than Zelensky’s. If the liberal internationalists wanted to avoid the intrusion of this lawless amorality on the “rules-based international order,” they ought to have done more to negotiate with Putin before the war, when the invasion could have been avoided.
Another sticking point in negotiations is the issue of security guarantees. Ukraine wants some assurance, before settling the conflict, that Russia won’t invade again in the future. Incredibly, some Russia hawks still lobby for Ukraine to be admitted into NATO, a nonstarter for the Kremlin. On X, former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul wrote,
We didn’t ask for Stalin’s permission to create NATO in 1949. We didn’t ask Khrushchev’s permission to bring West Germany into NATO in 1955. We didn’t ask for Yeltsin’s permission to expand NATO in the 1990s or Putin’s permission in the 2000s. [And] after these events, Moscow did not invade NATO members. So why are we asking for Putin’s blessing now? Illogical.
Blinded by moralism, McFaul still fails to see that NATO’s provocative expansion eastward after the Cold War made an invasion by Russia much more likely, and that ruling out Ukrainian membership—as Trump has done—is necessary to end the war. For McFaul, Ukraine has a right to ask for NATO membership, and NATO has a right to offer it membership, and that’s the end of the story, thank you very much. But the abstract “rights” of sovereign states tell one little about practical necessity or prudent policymaking.
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International politics is an ugly business. Its messy realities rarely if ever live up to the unblemished standards of absolute morality. It does not even offer the normal political mechanisms—a proper justice system, a welfare state, civic education—for roughly approximating moral ideals. Within these unforgiving constraints, Trump is trying to engineer a workable solution to the Russia–Ukraine war, one that will allow Ukrainians some measure of dignified security and enable the West to coexist again with Russia, a nuclear superpower.
The moralists, of course, evaluate Trump’s performance very differently. Bret Stephens, a neoconservative columnist at the New York Times, on Monday disparaged the president’s “transactional approach to foreign policy that discounts the moral force of American ideals.” Trump, in other words, is a realist, at least on Russia–Ukraine. For that reason, I would argue, he is Ukraine’s best hope for peace, a truth that even Zelensky and European leaders have started to acknowledge.
Moralizing liberals and neoconservatives have gotten Ukraine into a dreadful mess. I expect Trump the realist will get Ukraine out of it.
